Conversational Theme Pattern Print and the Silk Scarf
Conversational Theme Pattern Print and the Silk Scarf Conversational Theme Pattern Print and the Silk Scarf There is a particular kind of silk scarf that stops you in your tracks — not for its color alone, nor its drape, but for the tiny world printed across its surface. A garden party frozen in miniature. A hunt in full gallop across ivory silk. A fleet of sailboats tacking across an ocean of cobalt. These are the conversational theme prints, and among the many traditions woven into the history of the silk scarf, none is more charming, more personal, or more enduringly fashionable. The conversational print — named, fittingly, because it invites conversation — has its roots in the toile de Jouy tradition of eighteenth-century France, when the Oberkampf manufactory in Jouy-en-Josas began printing pastoral and narrative scenes onto cotton and linen using engraved copper plates. These fabrics depicted country life, mythological scenes, and exotic landscapes in monochromatic repeats, and F...